GRIT + PEARL is my monthly letter about all the annoying stuff that goes into writing books and being a person who writes books (or other stuff, I don’t know, I’m not your boss). You can sign up here. Here’s a letter from April.
No. 2 – How to Start a Book
If you’ve just sat down to start a book you’ve been thinking about writing for a long time, I have some news. You can’t start, because you already did. A lot of people think a writer is a person who sits in front of some paper, or a computer, and pulls words out of their mind. That’s a writer, but a writer is also a person who puts words into their mind, knowing they’ll come in handy later.
Thinking is writing. Exploring is writing. So is daydreaming, and so is having entire spiteful, hateful arguments with fake people in your head in the shower. It all counts (maybe not the arguments, those are just exhausting). It is all, at some level, the act of creation.
I think a lot about something before I start to write it. Increasingly, I’m asking myself what I’m trying to write before I start writing it, because it helps me to have a goal in mind. Not a word goal, but a legacy goal. I want to know the aura of the book I’m producing. I want to know how it’ll be described in 42 years, or talked about over a lunch at a casino buffet, or disparaged in the few minutes before the PTA meeting begins. I find that figuring out the myth of my book helps me tune my imagination towards using that myth as a blueprint for the reality of that book’s writing. I’m almost always better for sessions where I write not one word, but imagine I’ve written them all.
So how did I become this delusional? And what do I recommend to those who are setting out to begin a new book?
Homework
I found that I got a much better grip on my book after I finally learned to talk about it. And I learned to talk about it through listening to podcasts about writers, such as First Draft and Write or Die, and then daydreaming my way into my own version of those interviews. Give them a listen, and/or try to answer the following about your current project:
- What inspired this book?
- Why do you feel like you’re the person to write this story?
- What is the message of your story?
- What’s exciting about this story?
- Why is this story needed?
Now remember when I described my Very Intense Revisions Process? Take a look at your answers, and ask yourself a final question:
Is this what I’m writing? If not, how can I bring my work into alignment with my vision?
It’s
through this sort of structured imagining I slowly excavate the spirit
of what I’m working on. I know I’ll have to pull it into a real shape
as I actually write it, and that spirit will warp in that shape, but
I’ll always have that initial image to reference.
How do you get started? Where do you begin, when you’ve got a new project? Let me know! I’ll share some tips/tricks in my next letter 🙂